It depends really. If it's the exact same system, I'd agree. If it's a system that's put into place to display how much time you've put in, then it's something for everyone to work towards which doesn't particularly reward bots or the unemployed. I personally like the idea of the old system, it showed who put the most time in fairly easily and it was something to work on when I got back from school. I dislike the idea of gating gear entirely, so assuming the system was changed to provide a purely aesthetic reward, i'd be all for it.

"Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it." - Ayn Rand

The only thing I'd like to see return would maybe be rank deterioration. I'm not sure if rank sitting still exists now (More than likely does), but I'd like to see that completely abolished with eventual rank cleansing for people who do this. Or at the very least bump them down a rank or two for doing it.

"Your name was stolen? I see... Well, I guess that happens from time to time..."

Anyone that misses dishonorable kill either has no idea what it is, or never bothered with pushing to a higher rating. Having someone kill a fruit vendor in your raid group was enough to ruin your chances for getting a high rank.

That's why dishonorable kills were great. Nothing like dropping a Field Marshal in your party down to Commander because he decided to take a flight-path over the Crossroads at the wrong time.

Quite possibly one of the funniest moments in vent I was apart of.

Dishonorable kills were also great because people thought that they would actually discourage people from killing quest givers, and then they'd be even more infuriated when someone who didn't care came along and would camp an enemy town and instantly kill any quest npc that spawned. A friend of mine would farm Dishonorable Kills just to get a higher tally on his Honor Pane for people to inspect, while killing lowbies at the same time. I believe he was up to 11k before Burning Crusade.

ontopic: fuck no. the old pvp grind was god awful. having a ranking system on your server was great and all, but having to log 60-80+ hours a week to maintain your standing was soul draining and asinine.

Well first of all I have to say that the current system (as in the system that arrived by the end of Vanilla), while requiring less dedication, consists of only grinding as well. The only difference now is that you are meant as a player to get all the honor gear if you want to enter the PvP stage, whereas back then the best rewards were only meant for the most dedicated.

I think a great way WoW could have kept the old system and still have introduced the current would be to only allow progression in the honor system through world pvp and such, but with much less rank decay and without the huge grind requirements. This would also remove the aspect of botting.
Back then there was much more world pvp going on, even with the introduction to flying mounts, simply because servers weren't faction polariized as much as in Wrath and forward, and with such a system I think world PvP could have been kept alive much longer.

My honest opinion is that the system back then were miles ahead of the current because of how much it emphasized character progression and unqiue faction related rewards.